SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — Bars, restaurants, office spaces, lofts, parks, shops and more. These are the things that makeup what we view as downtown Sioux Falls, and if you’ve ever walked down the sidewalks of this part of town, you may have looked around and wondered, ‘who owns all this?’
Wonder no more.
In making this map, the very first step was determining the boundaries of downtown. Different sources have different definitions of those boundaries, and for this project, I opted to set my own.
Roughly, this wound up being an area contained within the bounds of Minnesota Ave. to the west, 14th St. to the south, 3rd Ave and N. Weber Ave. to the east, and Falls Park to the north.
While this depiction of downtown does include housing, including lofts, condos and apartments, it does not include any single-family homes.
In large part, this depiction of downtown also happens to follow the city’s zoning of the area as DTPUD, aka downtown mixed-use, with the addition of some areas zoned for recreation and for civic institutions.
The source for the information on ownership was taken from Minnehaha County’s open data map.
Without further ado, here is the map, which is interactive. A further breakdown can be found below.
Let’s talk colors. I’ve broken downtown into 7 color-shaded categories.
- Yellow – Commercial/business ownership
- Blue – City owned
- Purple – County owned
- White – Federally owned
- Pink – Non-profit ownership
- Green – Privately owned
- Brown – Railroad owned
While railroads are of course businesses, I opted to classify them as their own category due to the unique shape of the areas of downtown that they own.
Unsurprisingly, the single largest landowner in downtown is the city itself, followed by Minnehaha County.
When it comes to the railroads, the major owner is Burlington Northern (BNSF), though Great Northern Railway also owns land in downtown.
A number of non-profits own land in downtown, with the largest two being First Lutheran Church of Sioux Falls and Lutheran Social Services.
There are two federally-owned properties in downtown, the post office and the federal courthouse.
A number of private residences are scattered throughout downtown, mainly in the form of lofts. While the information on who owns these properties is public, I’ve opted not to name them specifically here.
Information on the companies shown on this map can be found on the South Dakota Secretary of State’s Business Information page by searching the name of the company. For best results, check the option for ‘contains’ rather than ‘starts with’ prior to searching.
